IE
If you're self-employed in Ireland, a proprietary director, or a landlord, you file under self-assessment — the Form 11 through ROS, by the pay-and-file deadline each autumn. The return is built from your income and your allowable expenses, and both moved through your bank account over the year. Converting your statements to a clean spreadsheet is what turns twelve euro-denominated PDFs into totals you can put on the Form 11 and stand over if Revenue asks. This covers doing that for self-assessment.
What the Form 11 draws from your statements
Self-assessment covers all your income and the expenses you can set against it. From the bank account you need:
- Income. Trading receipts, professional fees, or rental income — the credits that make up what you earned.
- Allowable expenses. The costs of the trade or profession, each of which needs to be a real transaction you can point to.
- Anything with its own treatment. Interest earned, or a capital item, that the return handles separately.
Because you're also paying preliminary tax for the following year at the same time, having a clear picture of the year just closed helps you judge that too.
From PDF to a Form 11-ready spreadsheet
- Download the year's statements as PDFs — AIB Internet Banking, Bank of Ireland's 365 Online, Permanent TSB's Open24 and the others keep them online.
- Convert each to Excel or CSV. Every transaction returns as a row — date, description, debit, credit and running balance in euro — with the closing figure checked.
- Combine the months into one sheet for the full tax year.
- Total income and sort expenses. Sum the income lines, then add a category column for your expense types and total each for the return.
Substantiating what you claim
The part of a self-assessment return most likely to be examined is expenses. Revenue expects you to show a business cost was genuinely incurred, and while the invoice or receipt carries the detail, the bank statement is the record that you paid it and when. With expenses as sortable rows, you group them by type, total each, and cross-check against your receipts, so every figure on the Form 11 has a transaction behind it. That's far quicker than reading a PDF, and it's exactly what keeps a return defensible — the difference between a claim you can evidence and one you're guessing at.
What the converter handles that a copy-paste won't
An AIB or Bank of Ireland statement often runs a payment's SEPA reference onto a second line, and a plain copy-paste turns that into a phantom row that shifts the euro columns — so a total you rely on for the return is wrong. The converter joins each reference back to its payment and checks the running balance across the year, so your income and expense totals are built on complete, reconciled data.
Preliminary tax and planning ahead
Self-assessment in Ireland has a twist that catches people out: at the pay-and-file deadline you're not only settling the year just gone, you're also paying preliminary tax towards the year ahead. Getting that estimate wrong means either a cash-flow squeeze or an underpayment charge. A converted year of statements is the clearest basis for the judgement — you can see exactly what the trade or profession earned and spent, which tells you whether the year ahead looks similar, up or down. Rather than guessing preliminary tax from a rough sense of how business is going, you set it against real figures. For a landlord or a sole trader whose income moves year to year, that's the difference between a return that's a formality and one that produces an unwelcome surprise.
Frequently asked questions
Can I convert my bank statements for self-assessment for free?keyboard_arrow_down
Yes. Upload each monthly PDF and get a clean Excel or CSV back free to start, with the euro balance checked so the year is complete.
Do I send my bank statements to Revenue?keyboard_arrow_down
Not with the Form 11, but you need them to prepare the return and to substantiate income and expenses if you're reviewed. A clean spreadsheet is the fastest way to have that in order.
Which Irish banks does it work with?keyboard_arrow_down
AIB, Bank of Ireland, Permanent TSB, EBS and An Post Money, plus Revolut and N26 accounts used in Ireland.
Can my accountant use the converted file?keyboard_arrow_down
Yes. A reconciled spreadsheet of income and categorized expenses is what an accountant would rather work from than a folder of PDFs, and it keeps their time — and your fee — down.
Try it on your own statement
Clean Excel/CSV, with every transaction checked to balance.